Some Words To Live By Quotes & Sayings

Look at you. You're young. You're scared. Why are you so scared? Stop being paralyzed. Stop swallowing your words. Stop caring what other people think. Wear what you want. Say what you want. Listen to the music you want to listen to. Play it loud as fuck and dance to it. Go out for a drive at midnight and forget you have work the next day. Stop waiting for Friday. Live now. Do it now. Take risks. This life is yours. — Anonymous

There is so much garbage being said about the mark of the beast. A lot of it is based on what I call the 'sky bus' rapture theory, and is not about the Kingdom. It is a kingdom of fear because it is not about the returning power of the sons of God. You do not find anyone who teaches the rapture theory talking about the resurrection in the life of every believer, or of the glory of the Son of God. I do not find the manifestation of the Kingdom in their lives: the power to raise the dead today and for us to live forever in that glory. I do not hear them talking about the coming glory. When darkness rises, the glory must come in a greater measure (Isaiah 60:1-2). I do not see them talking about the coming glory, all the rapture theory does is create a generation of fearful people - a people who will not sow into the future with their words to make their children believe that there is a hope for them to live for today. — Ian Clayton

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose
not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are.' And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation. — Ben H. Winters

At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the author's words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly. The book makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be. Just to read it - a little of it or in its entirety - is to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo. Even the sway and flow of language and cadence seem to me to make reference to the easy, inevitable movements of the sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

What do we do while we wait for my parents to find Jersey?" She let him go, took a step back.
"We live a normal life."
The words left his lips without emotion or meaning, because at this point he knew there was no such thing as a normal life for him.
Deep in his heart, he was still a vampire. — Kasi Blake

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter ... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. — John Ruskin

It's great to be self confident, but some people are very egotistical. Once you realize the world doesn't revolve around you and change your attitude, you'll truly walk in your purpose. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a 'Doctor Who' marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can't stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt. — L.K. Madigan

TO A GIRAFFE
If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and undesirable
to be literal - detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that
one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall? -
of which the giraffe is the best example -
the unconversational animal.
When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable
that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional
since less conversational
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.
After all
consolations of the metaphysical
can be profound. In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
"the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual. — Marianne Moore

Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. You can't expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don't exceed the employees' expectations of management. — Howard Schultz

The Internet has spawned an abusive malevolent platform that cyber stalkers and trolls can use to harm people in the real world and ruin their victims lives forever with their permanent posts. Cyberspace can also be used to hunt those that prey on innocent people, so that those who live by the malicious words may also feel the repugnant feeling of being stalked and hunted even in their own false sense of anonymity. — Don A. Holbrook

It's not real. Love is a product of habit and routine. If you break that habit and change those routines, the person you've loved and lost and can't live without suddenly becomes an easy memory to file in the back of your mind . In other words, love isn't a heart condition. It's not even an emotional one. It's just a four-letter word we use when we want to control someone else and ruin their life if we ever decide to walk out on them — Morgan Parker

I live within the world of books. — Lailah Gifty Akita

A bad word triggers another in your opponent. Be ready to reap what you plant — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Obedience, responsibility, rules and safety are loyal, inseparable playmates. But Love is their wise mother, who knows there are times to break them up, at least for a bit, lest they get into some kind of arrogant, bullish, mischief or completely shut out their other siblings - joy, common sense, and compassion. — Connie Kerbs

You live through ... that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History. — Robert Penn Warren

Don't live by my words, don't die by them, chew them slowly digest them, and smile if they give nourishment to your soul. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I hand over a lot of things when I'm home. Mom tells me she doesn't like my shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one -I hand that over too. It's easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box -even if the box is inside your head -and store it away for yourself. — Gin Phillips

Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous. — Robert Greene

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be "over" your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such
things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of
those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to
push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it
comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death.
They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died. — Cheryl Strayed

She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now
even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough. — Helen Oyeyemi

When the words come, they are merely empty shells without the music. They live as they are sung, for the words are the body and the music the spirit. — Hildegard Of Bingen

Intelligence is what we learn.
Wisdom is what we unlearn. — J.R. Rim

You should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that. — Walter Mosley

That's why we need to practice the presence of God: Not just to acknowledge in some philosophical way that God is present, but to rehearse, to repeat, to work and rework our knowledge that even though we don't see Him and sometimes don't feel Him, He is there. He is here. When we practice the presence of God, we train ourselves to desire His presence - to resist our temptation to flee Him. We also train ourselves to experience His presence - to resist our temptation to think that He flees us. In other words, the practice of the presence of God helps us to live between the temptations of Jonah bound for Tarshish and John bound in prison. Jonah is the prophet who wants to abandon God. John is the prophet who feels abandoned by God. — Mark Buchanan

We all have a vision, a dream to hope for.
Some chase it and some wish upon it..
Who do you think, wins?
the chaser finds ways to create it, regardless of the fight, the wisher finds way to excuse it, because courage doesn't fill their hearts. — Nikki Rowe

Often we suffer because we don't realize what's essential.
We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.
We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don't really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don't see them in the same way. — Lidiya K.

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. — Malcolm Gladwell

Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You. Man speaks in many tongues - tongues of language, of art, of action - but the spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it - so it is with all words, all spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit. — Martin Buber

You might think, 'I've got time to follow my dreams.' You don't have time. Life is short. The current life expectancy is 24,869 days. While some of us will live more days and some fewer, either way you have only a precious number of days to live this life, and so you do not have time to put off your dreams. It is now or never. If you don't do it now, you will keep putting it off, and you'll never do it. The time is now! — Rhonda Byrne

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. — Annie Dillard

If you're John Muir you want trees to
live among. If you're Emily, a garden
will do.
Try to find the right place for yourself.
If you can't find it, at least dream of it.
When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.
Anything that touches.
God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible,
entirely.
Some words will never leave God's mouth,
no matter how hard you listen. — Mary Oliver

I hadn't grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other. In fact, I never thought of days as such; only the words 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still kept some meaning. — Albert Camus

I must confess that I've never trusted the Web. I've always seen it as a coward's tool. Where does it live? How do you hold it personally responsible? Can you put a distributed network of fiber-optic cable "on notice"? And is it male or female? In other words, can I challenge it to a fight? — Stephen Colbert

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine ...
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote: ... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment. — Harlan Ellison

BY DISPOSITION OF ANGELS
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above particularities,
these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadiness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.
Star that does not ask me if I see it?
Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever. — Marianne Moore

In order to know the world from the outside, you must know yourself from the inside. — Steven Cuoco

Words are words. People add meaning to words.
Information is information. With words people add value to information.
Words breathe life into information. Words move mountains of information.
Words are action. Momentum for living evolves from pursuit of deeper, wider and higher significance, utility and value of words.
Words we sow, nourish and harvest feed hungry minds and hearts. Gathered words strengthen, ignite and release us.
Words identify, signify and proclaim our individuality. Words pronounce a purposeful life's choices.
With wisdom, courage and patience we must choose high-performing words for long-term relationships. Chosen words become soul mates. — John R. Dallas Jr.

You live not only for yourself but for others. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Live by your own sacred standard. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We live to share and serve. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Gift yourself the opportunity to allow for your dreams to chase you down. — Steven Cuoco

For years, i lived my life, waiting for the other shoe to drop ... i thought control was something i could have over my life. My goal was to live life, in such a way, that i would never again have to suffer any form of trauma or abuse that would remind me of my painful past. I was living life on a tightrope of tension. I was only happy when things went smoothly and came apart at the seams when i was thrown a curveball.
NOW, i realize, that the key to happiness is surrendering to the illusion of control. And to trust that, no matter what happens to me, i have the infinite inner-wisdom and strength to find my way through. — Jaeda DeWalt

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

I couldn't catch my breath. I buried my face in his shirt. He was my reason for existing. It was his words that pulled me to the surface. His breath that saved me. And now, his arms that held me within this life, unable to give up. He was my strength, and the love I didn't have for myself. And I couldn't live without him more than he could let me go. — Rebecca Donovan

Here is the time for the sayable, here
is its home.
Speak and attest. More than ever
the things we can live with are falling
away,
and ousting them, filling their place,
a will with no image.
Will beneath crusts which readily crack
whenever the act inside swells and
seeks new borders. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away. — Anaxagoras

Be aware of things you say because words have power. When you speak truth. It's Beautiful. And, that beauty illuminates! — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

You shouldn't throw stones if you live in a glass house and if you got a glass jaw, you should watch yo mouth: cause I'll break yo face. — 50 Cent

I can say it, but it doesn't seem convincing to most people. I can call it an 'injustice,' but that doesn't always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of 'injustice,' there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, 'Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.' There's a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is 'tiresome' unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing. — Jonathan Kozol

When it comes to words Mamma says, If they are not good, then maybe they should not be said. — Annette Bridges

It is a long journey, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Take nothing and no one for granted, be humble always, be kind especially when it's difficult and never forget the place where you came from and the people that helped you get where you are. These things will live on in you and through you, long after the words have faded. — C.K. Webb

And it's beyond my energy to explain why I don't think that four-letter word that everyone's so obsessed over and that gets everyone into so much trouble and pretty much makes everyone behave like an ass can live in a place like this. Somewhere during dry cleaning, details, and missed meals, it flakes away and what you're left with is married people with a tolerable affinity for each other. That little four-letter word can exist only in poetry, or movies of 2 to 3 hours in length. Maybe in a mini-series.
This place of dull details and irksome obligations is a home only to other four-letter words, which are used much more frequently. — Kendare Blake

I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea, and it would change things. That's a harmless conceit. With people, too, you constantly think, 'If I'm nice to people and treat them well, they'll appreciate it and behave better.' They won't, but it's still not a bad way to live. — Neil Peart

A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - "mizugo" - which translates loosely to "water children." Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it. In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Don't let your ego put you in a compromising situation. Don't allow your pride to keep you from seeking the help you need. And don't give in to your fears. Stay focused. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

In this age of decadence that we live in, people's minds are twisted and only words are loved but not preactial deeds. — Renee Ahdieh

Everything I know and I am and I have seen felt done past present past now then before now seen felt done hurt felt focus into a something beyond words beyond beyond beyond and it speaks now and it says.
Stay.
Fight.
Live.
Take it. — James Frey

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another. — Gerald Brenan

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly. — Pat Conroy

Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends. — Louis MacNeice

A conscience without regrets ~ to live life without having to say you're sorry. — E.A. Bucchianeri